Thursday, January 26, 2012

I love Valentine's Day. Not because I love romance or getting flowers of any of that... I love it because it means red and pink construction paper crafts and pink baked goods. Having kids in my life has made Valentine's Day a hundred times enjoyable for me because it means I get to indulge in all of this every year, for weeks leading up to the actual day.

We started our Valentine's crafting today with a construction paper heart garland. I was inspired by this craft that I saw on pinterest. It was so simple and beautiful, but not very kid friendly. You need a sewing machine, plus a needle and thread to string them all together. I took this basic idea, and did it with the kids using colored paper and glue sticks.

You get a nice-sized heart with a regular sheet of 8.5"x11" cut in half to make two long pieces. If the kids can use a glue stick, they can help quite a bit. The main difference between making the felt ones from the pinterest craft and these paper hearts is that you have to cut them into thin strips before making that second line of glue to make the heart shape- otherwise, your paper will crease when you cut it into garland.

the kids colored the paper before we assembled the hearts

We made our paper hearts into two types of garland. For the first type, I punched three holes in the heart with a regular hole punch so that the kids could thread through yarn and string them all together. For the second type, we just used the gluesticks to glue the hearts together, side by side.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

We had a theme activity day today - a Chinese New Year celebration for the kids. Luckily, I was able to find a few really great craft ideas online that the kids seemed to enjoy.

We started the morning with firework pancakes - plain old pancakes that I sprinkled jimmies onto while they were cooking.

Next, Miles (2) and Jude (4) used the computer to watch some Ni Hao Kai Lan videos and play a paper lantern game on Nick Jr's website.

Playing the game got them ready to make their own paper lanterns- an activity I found through google on kaboose. Check out the complete instructions here. Since the boys are way too young to do their own cutting, I gave them some red and yellow papers and let them color and stamp them, and then cut and stapled them into lanterns myself. The actual assembly time was minimal and the resulting craft is actually pretty cute.

After the lanterns, we made Chinese dragons that I found here on kaboose. The kids colored them, and I cut them out and glued on streamers to the bottom.

We ended our day with some Chinese traditional music and a Lunar New Year parade out in the yard.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

I wrote this pattern quite some time ago, when I had a Yarnigans blog on Vox. I stopped updating the blog, and then a few months later, Vox was taken down. I kept the pattern up as a ravelry download, but lost the pattern for the dress. I always figured if I started another blog, I could put the pattern back up-- so here she is.